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COMMEMORATIVE TRIBUTE TO 

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 

By HENRY VAN DYKE 


READ IN 

THE 1920 LECTURE SERIES OF 

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 



AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 


1922 




















































COMMEMORATIVE TRIBUTE TO 


HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 

By HENRY VAN DYKE 
• / 


READ IN 

THE 1920 LECTURE SERIES OF 

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 



AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 


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Copyright, 1922, by 

The American Academy of Arts and Letters 

/ 3330 / 



> 

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 1 

By Henry van Dyke 

A tribute to the memory of Hamil- 
ton Wright Mabie must be full of deep 
and warm affection if it would ex- 
press in any measure the thoughts and 
feelings of the many who knew him 
personally while he walked the paths 
of earth, — a serene, wise, and gener- 
ous comrade in the crowded pilgrim- 
age of American life. 

He was a man with a genius for 
friendship and helpfulness. Religious 
by nature and holding to Christian 
faith and ideals with unalterable con- 
viction, he had a simple, practical, 

1 Read April IS, 1920. 


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beautiful, common-sense quality of 
manhood which kept him from ever 
becoming a bigot, a fanatic, or a senti- 
mentalist. He understood human na- 
ture, with all its faults and twists, and 
he loved it notwithstanding all. Steer- 
ing his own course with a steady hand, 
he wished not to judge or dominate 
other men, but only to help them to see 
the star by which he steered and to 
make its light useful to them for guid- 
ance. Those who came to him for 
counsel got it clean and straight, often 
with that touch of humor which was 
the salt of his discourse. 

Those who disliked and scorned him 
as an “old fogy,” and followed him 
with a strange malice of petty mock- 
ery, found him silent, tolerant, content 
to go forward with his own work for 
human progress, and ready to help 
them if they got into trouble. He was 
the most open-minded and kind- 
hearted of men. To his acquaintances 


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OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

3 

and his thousands of auditors on his 
lecture-tours he was a voice of tran- 
quil wisdom, genial wit, and serene 
inspiration. To his intimates he was 
an incomparable friend. 

I came to know him well only after 
he had passed middle life. But I am 
sure that the spirit which was in him 
then had animated him from the be- 
ginning, and continued to illuminate 
him to the end of his life. Mabie was 
not a man to falter or recant. He 
advanced. He fulfilled the aim of 
Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior,” who 

When brought 

Among the tasks of real life hath 
wrought 

Upon the task that pleased his childish 
thought. 

He was born at Cold Spring, N. Y., 
in 1846, and graduated from Williams 
College in 1867, and from the Colum- 
bia College Law School in 1869. But 


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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


the practice of law as a profession did 
not attract or satisfy him. In 1879 he 
became an editorial writer for The 
Christian Union, a religious periodical 
of broadening scope and influence 
which developed, under the leader- 
ship of Lyman Abbott and Hamilton 
Mabie and an able staff, into the lib- 
eral, national, Christian weekly well- 
named The Outlook. Mabie’s work 
on this paper was constant, devoted, 
happy, and full of quiet inspiration for 
clearer thinking and better living. 
Most of his articles, which must have 
numbered thousands during his service 
of thirty-seven years, were unsigned. 
But they bore the image and super- 
scription of his strong character, fine 
intelligence, broad sympathies, and 
high standards, both in literature and 
in life. 

They were not sermons. They 
were simple words of wisdom uttered 
in season. They were sometimes pun- 


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OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

5 

gent, — for he had a vivid sense of 
righteousness, — but they were never 
malicious or strident. They were the 
counsels of a well-wisher. He hated 
evil, but when he struck at it he de- 
sired to help those whom it had de- 
ceived and enslaved. For the most 
part he wrote from the positive rather 
than from the negative side, preferring 
the praise of right to the condemnation 
of wrong. Something in his character 
permeated his style. A certain unpre- 
tending reasonableness, a tranquil as- 
surance of the ultimate victory of light 
over darkness, an understanding sense 
of the perplexities and shadows which 
overcast our mortal life, gave to the 
words which he wrote from week to 
week a quiet power of penetration and 
persuasion. They entered myriads of 
homes and hearts for good. In this 
service to modern life through the edi- 
torial pages of The Outlook he con- 
tinued steadily, gladly, faithfully, 


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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


until his earthly work ended on New 
Year’s Eve, 1916. 

During this long period of profes- 
sional labor as a writer for the press, 
he developed a national influence per- 
haps even wider as a public lecturer 
and an author. 

No man in America was more wel- 
come to an intelligent audience, for a 
lyceum lecture or a commencement 
address, than Hamilton Mabie. Here 
his personal qualities had full play, 
perhaps even more than in his writing. 
His radiant nature, his keen sense of 
humor, his ready and attractive man- 
ner of speech, his sympathy with all 
sorts and conditions of men and wo- 
men, gave him quick and easy access 
to his listeners. They went with him 
because he appealed to them. He 
reached them because he took the trou- 
ble to open the doors. 

The material of his lectures, as in 
the case of Emerson, was that which 


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OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

7 

he afterwards used in his books. But 
when he was speaking it was put in a 
different form — more free, more col- 
loquial, adapted to the occasion. Why 
should a speaker regard his audiences 
as cast-iron receptacles for a dose of 
doctrine ? Mabie never did that. But 
he always had something to say that 
was serious, well-considered, worth 
thinking about. That was the reason 
why thoughtful people liked to hear 
him. 

He was a popular lecturer in the best 
sense of the phrase. The demands 
upon his time and strength in this field 
were incessant. In addition he had the 
constant appeal of humane and hopeful 
causes looking to the betterment of 
social life, — like the Kindergarten So- 
ciety of which he was for many years 
the president. To these calls he was 
always ready to respond. It was his 
self-forgetfulness in such work that 
exhausted his strength and brought on 


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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


his final illness. He was a soldier on 
the firing-line of human progress. In 
that cause he was glad to give his life. 

His books have deserved and had a 
wide reading and a high appreciation. 
They show the clear carefulness of his 
thinking, the depth of his love for 
nature and human nature, the excel- 
lence of his skill as a writer of pure 
and translucent English. 

Nothing could be better for the pur- 
pose for which they were intended 
than the volumes in which he ren- 
dered, for the boys and girls of to-day, 
the great stories and legends of the 
past, — Norse Stories from the Eddas , 
Myths Every Child Should Know , 
Heroes Every Child Should Know, 
and so on. 

But much more significant and orig- 
inal is the series of books in which he 
made his contribution to the art of 
essay- writing, — My Study Fire, Under 
the Trees and Elsewhere, Short Stud- 


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OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

9 

ies in Literature. These are rich in 
the fruits of observation in the home, 
the library, the great out-of-doors, — 

The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 

These volumes were followed by oth- 
ers in which he expressed his deepen- 
ing thoughts on the unity and the 
beauty of life in brief essays on Na- 
ture and Culture , Books and Culture, 
Work and Culture, The Life of the 
Spirit, and The Great Word, — by 
which he means Love, not blind and 
selfish, but open-eyed, intelligent, gen- 
erous, — the kind of love which made 
his home a refuge of peace, a spring 
of joy and strength. 

It is a fine ideal which guides the 
course of all these essays, — an ideal 
of the cooperation of nature and books 
and work in the unfolding of person- 
ality. Culture, in that sense, was 
Mabie’s conception of the best reward 


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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


that life has to give. Knltur, in the 
German sense, machine-made and iron- 
bound, he despised and hated. For 
this and other reasons he was ardent 
for the cause of the free and civilized 
nations against Germany in the bar- 
baric war which she forced upon the 
world in 1914. 

But the bulk of his work lies back 
of this sharp and bitter crisis, in a 
period of general tranquillity, through 
which his writing flows like a pure and 
fertilizing stream in a landscape. He 
was an optimist, but not of the rose- 
water variety. He knew that life in- 
volves painful effort, hard conflict. 
Nevertheless he believed that for those 
who will face the conflict and make 
the effort, help and victory are sure. 
He was a critic, delighting to read and 
comment upon the great books, — 
Homer, the Greek Tragedies, the Me- 
diaeval Epics, Dante, Shakespeare, 
Milton, and the more modern classics. 


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1 1 

But he was not a technical and scho- 
lastic critic. He sought to catch the 
spirit and meaning of the literature 
which he loved. His work always 
reminds me of that passage in the 
Pilgrim's Progress which describes 
the “House of the Interpreter.” The 
beauty of his comment on the classics 
is that it has a way of being right about 
their real significance. 

This is true of his most important 
critical work , — William Shakespeare , 
Poet, Dramatist, and Man. On this 
volume he spent long, loving, patient 
study and toil. The result was one of 
the best, clearest, most readable and 
illuminating books in Shakespearean 
literature. Its central thesis, — that 
Shakespeare’s poetic genius, his gift 
of vision, passion, and . imagination, 
was the spring of his dramatic power, 
and that therefore, despite our imper- 
fect knowledge of his biography, we 
may be sure of his greatness as a 

- 

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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


man, — is thoroughly sound. It is set 
forth with admirable lucidity and 
abundant illustration. 

There is one of Mabie’s books which 
is less known than others. It is called 
A Child of Nature. It represents his 
first and only attempt, so far as I 
know, in the field of fiction. But it is 
fiction of a peculiar type, — no plot, 
little dialogue, no incidents except 
birth and death and the ordinary run 
of life in the New England village 
where John Foster spent his days. 
The theme of the book, developed with 
deep fidelity and subtle beauty, is the 
growth of this quiet, simple, lonely 
man’s spirit in the fellowship of na- 
ture and of great books. He dies 
silent and alone, never having learned 
to speak to the world or even to his 
neighbors the wisdom which he has 
garnered. But some brief daily rec- 
ord of his experiences, his thoughts, 
the light of life that has come to him, 


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T 3 

he has written down and leaves behind 
him. Then comes a young man of 
another type, Ralph Parkman, scholar, 
traveler, and author, to live in the old 
farmhouse. He finds the forgotten 
papers, and their sincerity and beauty 
take hold of him. He gives them the 
form and finish which they need, and 
sends them out to the world. 

“It was a little book which finally 
went forth from the old house, but it 
was very deep and beautiful ; like a 
quiet mountain pool, it was far from 
the dust and tumult of the highways, 
and there were images of stars in it. 
With the generosity of a fine spirit the 
younger man interpreted the life of 
the older man through the rich atmo- 
sphere of his own temperament, but 
there was nothing in the beautiful 
flowering and fruitage which the world 
received from his hand which was not 
potentially in the heart and mind of 
John Foster. The silent man had come 


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THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 


to his own, for God had given him a 
voice. After the long silence of a life- 
time he spoke in tones which vibrated 
and penetrated, not like great bells 
swung in unison in some high tower, 
but like dear familiar bells set in old 
sacred places, whose sweet notes are 
half-audible music and half-inaudible 
faith and prayer and worship.” 

With these words of his own I leave 
this brief, imperfect tribute to Ham- 
ilton Mabie as man and author. The 
value of his work is still living in the 
hearts of his hearers and readers 
whom it has enlightened and encour- 
aged. It is worthy to be treasured. 
To me the memory of his friendship is 
more precious than words can tell. 
Twenty years ago I tried to express 
something of its meaning in a bit of 
verse dedicated to his comradeship. 

0 who will walk a mile with me 

Along life’s merry way? 

A comrade blithe and full of glee, 


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OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

J 5 

Who dares to laugh out loud and free, 
And let his frolic fancy play, 

Like a happy child, through the flowers 
gay 

That fill the field and fringe the way 
Where he walks a mile with me. 

And who will walk a mile with me 

Along life’s weary way? 

A friend whose heart has eyes to see 
The stars shine out o’er the darkening 
lea, 

And the quiet rest at the end o’ the day,— 
A friend who knows, and dares to say, 
The brave, sweet words that cheer the 
way 

Where he walks a mile with me. 

With such a comrade, such a friend, 

I fain would walk till journeys end, 
Through summer sunshine, winter rain. 
And then? — Farewell, we shall meet 
again ! 


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